DAILY NEWS: LONDON - "Those who cure you are going to kill you."
That, a British priest said Wednesday, was the cryptic warning made to him in Jordan by a purported al-Qaida chief months before the failed car bombings in London and Glasgow that have been linked to a group of foreign Muslims working as doctors in Britain.
British authorities have said the attacks bore the hallmarks of an al-Qaida operation, but security officials say investigators are still trying to determine whether there was any direct link between the alleged plotters and an outside mastermind.
Canon Andrew White, a senior Anglican priest who works in Baghdad, said he met the man privately with a translator and sheik after holding talks with Sunni Muslim tribal and religious leaders April 18 in the Jordanian capital, Amman. He meets regularly with extremists in an attempt to calm Iraq's sectarian violence.
He said religious leaders told him the man was an al-Qaida leader who traveled from Syria to the meeting. The man, an educated Iraqi in his 40s and dressed in Western clothes, warned of attacks on Britain and the United States, White said.
"It was like meeting the devil," he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Baghdad. "He talked of destroying Britain and the United States and then said, `Those who cure you are going to kill you."' Priest may have received clues before U.K. attacks (more) By Paisley Dodds, Associated Press
Mark Alexander
